Hi dmf, I hadn’t heard about Chavacano language before, so I went until Wikipedia to know more about it. I found an Online dictionary page in Chavacano but unfortunately they only published from A to I-J to Z doesn’t exist. I tryed to pass an e-mail to the mailo, but it looks like it it a dead page (a page that someone creates for a period of time (maybe while be in an University studing) and than they abandoned the page. It is a pity this kind of thing happens with a language. Anyway, thanks for your information. I knew about one more language.

The first recording I made from Radio România sounded very Slavic. I knew Romanian has been influenced by the Slavic languages, but not that much! After some investigation, I realised it was Russian. Doh!

Yes, it’s definitely Romanian. As a native Romanian speaker, I am puzzled about the previous comments regarding “the slavic feel of it”. Maybe because I have had no exposure to Slavic languages, but only to other Romance and Germanic languages. Interesting this “slavic feel” you mention…

For me, as a Slavic speaker, it does not sound Slavic at all. On the contrary, the Slavic heritage is for me more visible from the written form when I can more easily identify words like război, obicei etc.

I guessed Aromanian, mainly because I did believe that all quizes here are concentrated on some obscure and little known languages. In fact, I haven’t idea how great are differences between Romanian and Aromanian. I guess mutual intelligibility is quite strong, right?

Anyway, how well can Romanians understand other Romance languages, especially Italian, without learning?

In what concerns Aromanian, I have never heard it being spoken. In its written form though, Aromanian is strikingly intelligible to a native Romanian, I think. It does not have the flavour of literary Romanian, but of Romanian as they speak it in some villages.

Romanian and the other Romance languages are not mutually intelligible. It is true though that in terms of understanding Italian, French or Spanish, Romanian speakers get a head start: by exposure to these languages they begin to understand them. As a kid, I liked to watch cartoons on Italian TV and eventually got to understand the language and I still do. But when it comes to learning to speak and write the language correctly, that head start is not that big, as you still have to get the right prepositions, the right genders, the right phrasal verbs, etc, meaning just exactly the type of difficulties that any intermediate or advanced student of that language has 🙂